Essay by Eric Worrall
A horrid mess of impoverished workers, alleged pollution, government subsidies and a big dose of greenwashing.
Energy Secretary embroiled in new Drax greenwashing row
By CALUM MUIRHEAD
UPDATED: 06:51 AEST, 27 April 2025Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has been accused by US activists of being complicit in the pollution of a town in Mississippi by handing billions in taxpayer cash to a UK power firm that they claim is harming the health of residents.
Drax Group operates a power plant in Selby, North Yorkshire, that generates electricity by burning wood pellets. Many of these are sourced from forests in the US and shipped to the UK.
Activists from Gloster in Mississippi, where Drax runs a wood pellet factory, say pollution from its plant has caused health issues for people nearby, including heart disease, cancer and respiratory problems.
…
Nonetheless, the company has received billions in green energy subsidies from the Government. In February, Miliband agreed to hand the group another £2 billion in taxpayer cash over four years.
…
Read more: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-14650335/Energy-Secretary-embroiled-new-Drax-greenwashing-row.html
There is a fair bit to unpack.
According to the article, Drax has paid millions of dollars in fines in recent years. Local US officials also recently refused permission for Draw to increase emissions.
The town of Gloster in Mississippi is a low income mostly black community of 897 people. Drax employs around 49 people.
If Drax is forced to pull out, around 49 jobs will be lost in a community where jobs are in short supply. But the green funding provided by the British government is helping to spread pollution in a vulnerable community, and is part of the green insanity which is impoverishing British people.
Is the pollution form the Drax wood chip plant in Gloster genuinely causing problems? Who knows – these days, it’s difficult to tell the difference between fake activist pollution standards and pollution which causes a genuine problem. But it seems possible someone has been careless with waste, and woodchipping on that scale produces a lot of waste.
What a mess. I’m glad it’s not my job to sort it out.
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If you want a bit of light relief and humour may I offer
https://phys.org/news/2025-04-world-biggest-companies-trillion-climate.html
Rarely do you ever so much crap blatantly masquerading as science, apparently attribution statistics has now become science.
I am sure given the situation above they will be able to determine the exact damages 🙂
I lasted a couple of paragraphs. Really glad I dropped my Nature subscription years ago. Why anyone trusts anything coming out of them any more, I do not know. It will be interesting when the whole climate fiasco comes crashing down and the US government funding trough dries up. I wonder if they’ll start publishing articles tearing Michael Mann apart when the winds shift.
I, for one, would very much welcome the attempt!
Not funny for the 49 workers and their families, whichever way it goes and whoever is telling the truth. But funny watching enviros turning on each other.
Well Drax has admitted fault and paid the following
2019 $110,000 for monitoring violations aka monitor stations not working
2020 $2.5 million for over three times the legal limit for Volatile Organic Compounds
2022 $225,000 for 50% over the legal limit for Volatile Organic Compounds
2024 Drax has agreed to pay £25m towards a voluntary redress scheme
Mind you they received $762 million in “green” loans in the period so whats that a fraction of a perecent 😉
You have to remember that in most cases, the so called “legal limits” are set absurdly low.
Does anyone have any information on the wood chip preparation? I suspect freshly chipped wood is heated to dry them. Otherwise they would storing piles of damp wood which will still be liable to spontaneous combustion?
How much energy is wasted drying the wood?
Step 5
https://www.drax.com/us/uncategorized/9-steps-to-making-a-compressed-wood-pellet/
Good summary that points out that chipping is only a fraction of preparing the wood to make pellets with the right properties for transportation and combustion.
chipping is only a fraction of preparing the wood
I’m curious how much energy does it take to prepare the wood – starting from cutting the trees up to delivery to the plant – vs. how much energy it produces. Has that analysis been done?
Oh, I didn’t realise burning wood was carbon neutral
Now that I think about, yes of course, because trees (especially those from Mississipi) can grow to maturity in less than 6 weeks
so we can keep cutting the down by hand to avoid using electric chainsaws and use bicycles and wooden rafts to transport them all the way to the UK, where trees have become extinct
Silly me, I wish I’d though of that
This begs the question:
How much wood
Could a wood chipper chip
If a wood chipper could chip wood?
millions of dollars in fines
Paid for by us…
£6.5 billion for Drax, the biggest single recipient.
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmselect/cmpubacc/715/report.html
Poor people have been having more health problems compared to the population in general, for as long as there have been poor people.
Proclaiming that a poor area is being harmed by one actor or another, and using as evidence the fact that the poor people aren’t as healthy as middle class and rich people, has been one of the go to props of conniving do-gooders since the advent of conniving do-gooders.
The rest of the story:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Drax+Biomass+Inc.+Amite+Bioenergy/@31.1833763,-91.0348358,1601m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x86266dc143308f6d:0xf42437bf851a130e!8m2!3d31.1833763!4d-91.0348358!16s%2Fg%2F11b6t7c38j?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDQyMy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
Where is the rail line?
Where is the ship channel?
What?
Oh, right, the wood chips are moved by truck from Gloster, Miss. to England.
The plant is about 40 road miles from Natchez, a port on the Mississippi River for 300 years, then 180 miles or so to New Orleans, and it would then be water all the way to the UK just as it was in the King Cotton days. As we all know, clear-cutting trees, dragging them to a processor to be chipped, dehydrated, pressed and bound into pellets, trucked to a river port, barged to New Orleans, transferred to a ship in New Orleans, and carried across the Atlantic (to return empty?) in an oil-burning freighter is carbon neutral and super-green.
File class action suits for reparations.
This is a modern version of the pillage phase of British colonialism. Except in this case the beneficiaries are the Greens with payoffs. Will they construct more grand estates in the UK like the ones built by the colonialists, with tax credits?